Democrats Still Don't Understand What They're Up Against

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"To negotiate with such people, to treat them as colleagues and friends, to accept this as a normal partisan disagreement is to validate this grotesque hypocrisy."

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Democratic politicians have a seemingly endless well of good faith for their Republican colleagues. Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and even Bernie Sanders all speak with the language of decency, full of assurances that Republicans will be heard, understood and engaged. They offer appeals to morality, norms and shared values as if saying it often enough will make it true.

But there is no salvaging the Republican Party. Its leaders are beyond shame, beyond rules, beyond reason. Democrats can speak in the dialogue of peace, but the only dialect Republicans understand is power.

In the face of an unspeakable atrocity on our southern border ― constructed, announced and implemented by President Donald Trump’s administration, this Republican-led Congress does nothing and leverages none of its authority as a co-equal branch of government. Despite years of rhetoric about family values and shining cities on hills, the Republican Party allowed and tacitly condoned separating, perhaps irreparably, asylum seekers from the very children they fled here to save. Then, with more than 2,000 children still stranded away from their parents, they went on vacation.

To negotiate with such people, to treat them as colleagues and friends, to accept this as a normal partisan disagreement is to validate this grotesque hypocrisy.

This is what it means to give good-faith scoldings about civility when the barest hint of power is turned against those who constantly wield it as a weapon. This paradigm renders civil disobedience in the face of abuse outside the bounds of society. It civilizes lying daily for the purpose of obfuscating the sins and crimes the federal executive is committing against his own population. That the previous sentence makes sense is a tragedy, yet it is a greater calamity that both national parties are defending the order of a world in which it is true.

If Democrats are to change the course of events, they will need to process that they, like all of us, have been utterly betrayed.

Predictably, without any restraints placed upon them, Republicans have begun shaping the law and its interpretation in their favor at an alarming rate. Senate leadership, embodied by Mitch McConnell, prevented a hearing on a nominee for the Supreme Court not due to qualifications or extremism, but simply because proceeding with established norms would not serve Republican goals.

Democrats, by refusing to defend their authority to govern on behalf of their constituents and prioritizing the sentiments and responses of Republican voters, have sacrificed the instruments of power for the perception of principle. Continuing this strategy is to misunderstand this moment in history. The Republican Party has already conceded to its extremism, codified it and entrenched it. There is no political no norm it will not break, no kindness or tolerance its leaders will reciprocate. They do not believe in government by the people, for the people, but in government by Republicans for Republicans. To accommodate them is only to empower them.

Leah Millis / Reuters

It may seem counterintuitive that the only means of saving democracy is to jettison the civility and standards that lay at its foundations. But this mistakes civility as the source of good in democracy and not the product of a system that sees and protects the equality of its citizens. The former view ― seeing empathy, reciprocity and mutual respect as ends in and of themselves rather than tools of consensus and understanding ― only leaves the door open for abuse from those who have no interest either.

If Democrats are to change the course of events, they will need to process that they, like all of us, have been utterly betrayed.

It will be difficult. It will make our politics feel more rancorous, more hostile, less conciliatory. But it would be wrong for the Democrats to seek reconciliation while the Republican Party organizes government to recognize only its ideology as legitimate, systematically assaults Democratic constituents and actively condones the abandonment of international law and the heinous human rights abuses still happening to thousands of asylum-seekers.

There can be no peace on terms that leave this order intact. It may be that the only way to reveal the better angels of their nature is to purge them of their demons first.

Kaitlin Byrd is a writer and political activist based in her hometown of Brooklyn. She tweets at @GothamGirlBlue.